I realize that it’s only March, but I’m already dreaming about summer. In the Northern Hemisphere, we are less than two weeks from the Spring Equinox and (for me, anyway) this “tipping point” at which the days start becoming longer than the nights marks the end of the uphill climb of winter’s cold drudgery. I love all four seasons for different reasons, but often it seems like by its end, Chicago’s winter – with its gray days, cold nights, and increasingly litter- and dog doo-scattered sidewalks – is like that one person in your Saturday night crew who kept doing shots and got progressively sloppier long after everyone else was done and ready to go home. It will be warmer soon enough.
In the meantime, spring brings with it not just enjoyment of its own beauty, but of preparations for the best summer ever that you just know you’re going to have. Thank goodness for the internet and online shopping, which make it easier to research purchases before you make them. Are you looking for the newest, dopest, boomiest portable Bluetooth speakers for the beach or poolside that just came out this year?
You can find them online… and you’d better buy them now before they sell out once summer actually gets here. Ditto that for the new, multipurpose cooler, barbecue grill or even that automotive-themed beach towel you just discovered. All of this is to say that after I had finished writing last Monday’s post about that ’67 Thunderbird Landau sedan that was for sale, I started thinking about other car-buying opportunities I had encountered and missed over the past few years.
Back in August of 2015, I was on a road trip from the Pittsburgh area to Brookfield, Ohio, when I stopped for gas and noticed this ’68 Fury III convertible parked on a side street off the main thoroughfare that connected with the I-376 interstate It was a bright red, chrome-laden roadside beacon that was impossible for me to ignore. My co-pilot and navigator seemed game to let me have a look at this car, so I parked the rental Ford Fusion nearby and walked up to this crimson beauty with my Canon.
I absolutely love the linear, geometric styling of the pre-“Fuselage” full-sized Chrysler products of this period. The big cars from General Motors had all been fully swoopified by the late-’60s – a look that was completely in vogue at that time. Styling of the big Ford products, while arguably much less daringly-styled than their GM counterparts, had also started moving in a more rounded, organic direction by then. The ChryCo C-Bodies, though (as was usually the case, say, 80% of the time), had followed the GM aesthetic… about four or five years after GM did it.
I wouldn’t say that the styling of this ’68 Fury is a clone or even derivative of that of a ’64 Impala (or Galaxie), but there’s no mistaking that while GM and Ford had recently been shopping for the new style of “hep” duds, Chrysler was just then starting to wear what had already been on the way out. Time has been the true equalizer, though, and sometimes a simple, classic look ends up withstanding the test of time much better than more adventurous styles.
Take one look at all the colors, patterns, cuts, and synthetic fabrics of clothes from the 1970s. While I personally like some of those styles, as far as being enduringly attractive, they can’t compare with classic cuts, fits and materials of clothing made out of things that actually grew from living sources. In 2019, the stylistic differences between a top-level ’68 Impala Custom and a same-year Fury III is, to me, like that between a Nehru jacket and a classic, tailored, traditionally-styled sport coat. The Impala may have looked more “with it” in 1968, but fifty years later, the angular Fury seems to have a style that is at least as attractive.
I am not a huge fan of the Fury “I, II & III” trim level designations of the lower-tier Plymouth full-sizers. I can’t imagine an easier way for a salesman to encourage an upsell than to point out that a car a potential customer is interested in is “just” a Fury I, and that everyone will know how cheap that customer is for having selected one. (Stupid Roman numerals.) I mean, seriously, there was also a Sport Fury and also a “VIP” for the really fancy people, so were the differentiators really necessary for the lesser Furys? I understand that the more highly-optioned, more expensive cars make dealers more money, and also that mine is sort of a rhetorical question, but I had to ask it. I simply like the idea of being able to take one car and option it however you want with the funds and tastes you have.
This Fury III convertible was one of just under 4,500 produced for ’68. A convertible Sport Fury was also available, with about 2,500 finding buyers. Seven thousand convertibles accounts for just 2% of about 349,500 full-sized Plymouths produced that year, including the aforementioned VIP (its own separate model that year) and the Suburban wagons. Our featured car appears to have been powered by a 383 cubic inch V8, with horsepower ratings ranging originally between 290 and 330 hp in top-spec form.
Like the other full-size offerings from low-price rivals Chevrolet and Ford, the Fury hardtop coupe was available with two distinctly different rooflines: a semi-fastback, and a more traditional or “formal” notchback style. The most popular configuration of the ’68 Fury was the III hardtop sedan, of which about 57,900 were sold. Looking at this particular car, it is so hard to think that a mere six years later, the new-for-’74 full-size Fury would sell just one-third of the ’68 total, with just 118,000 sold – and sales would get much worse before the (Gran) Fury’s discontinuation for ’78 and temporary revival for 1980 and ’81.
This ’68 Fury, though, has so much style. I remember being particularly taken with the back seat of this car: the button-tufted black vinyl upholstery, and the Plymouth “frog legs” emblem in that little alcove set into the seatback. And while stacked quad headlights were derivative of a look that Pontiac had previously fostered and made popular, this Plymouth wears them well. This car is called a “Fury”, and with the slightly downward-canted angle of the headlight surrounds, this car looks… well, furious.
As for the rest of the car, I tend to seek out vintage furniture that follows the same, basic aesthetic as what we see in this Fury: linear, nicely detailed, and just a little formal. Even the sports-leaning Magnum 500s and raised white letter tires this car is riding on can’t diminish from its distinguished poise. Who says you can’t have sporty and elegant at the same time in a full-sized car?
The asking price was $8,500. I toyed with the idea of walking up the side street to talk with the owner / seller (and perhaps take a test drive), but as has been the case before, I didn’t want to get his or her hopes up. And who knows? Maybe, I might have been driving back to Chicago in a ’68 Fury III convertible that weekend without having really thought about where I was going to store it in the short run before making a permanent plan. It’s probably for the best, as when it come to what classic car I hope to purchase eventually, it’s like it has been sometimes with eating Lays potato chips and not being able to choose “just one”.
Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
Saturday, August 29, 2015.
Yes, winter sucks and it’s really sucked this year. Seeing this Plymouth on the last morning for below freezing temperatures (according to the ten day forecast) is causing some delightful warmth at 4 am.
These Plymouths have grown on me tremendously the last five years or so. Where they once seemed so stodgy they, like Joe says, have revealed an eternal cool factor. Even the basic ones don’t come across as cheap so much as simply more focused and business minded.
Speaking of, there was a ’68 Fury I two-door sedan that roamed near my in-laws house for years. Of course I never got any pictures of it (before CC) but that car is one I’ve longed to find again – there is such purpose and determination in its lines.
Joe, you found perhaps the ultimate expression of ’68 Fury.
Thanks for the great writeup.
The wheels appear to be factory option Magnum 500s or similar instead of Cragar.
Magnum 500s! Of course. Thank you for the correction, and I’ll fix it. 🙂
Its not my favorite dashboard, but in general I could definitely go for one of these.
“Somebody” started a conversation about ’60s Top 40 radio this weekend and got me daydreaming about getting my Chrysler out, but a look at the 10 day forecast suggests otherwise.
““Somebody” started a conversation about ’60s Top 40 radio this weekend”
Sorry about that. 🙂 If it helps any, I have the same problem with a Miata that is begging me to go out and play. And the 90s music that goes with it is still commonly being broadcast.
If you subscribe to SiriusXM you can listen to music from the forties through today 🙂 Of course one of the unintended side effects of the “narrowcasting” on sat radio is that most people only listen to a few stations and don’t get exposed to other types of music. In the area where I grew up there was basically one Top 40 station that nearly everyone of high school age listened to; it was common to hear a Motown song, followed by Steppenwolf, followed by Sam and Dave, followed by Three Dog Night, etc. Now, to listen to those four artists, you would likely need to listen to four separate channels.
I also miss radio stations like that, that played all different types of music. That kind of variety would be welcome on a long drive somewhere. Nowadays, to get that kind of mix of music, I’d have to place my MP3 player on shuffle and connect it to a car’s audio system.
(And Dan, warmer spring weather will be here before you know it! In Chicago, we get about ten minutes of spring between a long winter and a hot summer. 🙂 )
I disagree. I listen almost exclusively to Sirius/XM. Let me walk this back. Yes, I tend to listen to the same genre for the most part, but pop/rock covers nearly 40 channels, country covers anther 10, and I also frequent the half dozen comedy stations. While I do like the dearth of commercials, my favorite thing about satellite radio is the music I’ve never heard before…from 20 to 30 years ago, as well as the new music that I wouldn’t hear on terrestrial radio, or the insulated bubble of my CDs. The “narrow-casting” isn’t so narrow. I’ll hear the same artist cross-broadcast on several different stations, too. I’ll admit a couple of my favorites are Deep Tracks, songs off of popular albums that weren’t hits; The Spectrum, a mix of old and new; and Garage Rock, with lots of underground music. Heck, I even heard Red Hot Chili Peppers on Outlaw Country. #ilovemysatelliteradio
I as well! Favs being XMU and Alt, but I love hearing the unfamiliar takes on the Beatles channel, and love to surf 60s-90s, Opera, Classical and Willie’s Roadhouse. I’ve been subscribing for 12 years and can’t imagine ever listening to terrestrial radio again. With base negotiating skills, you can easily get it to $9/ month. The only downside is Houston is one of the major cities affected by the T-Mobile tower interference, where you lose the signal for a few seconds every 5-6 miles.
So that’s why I lose signal for no apparent reason for a few seconds here and there? And yes, I surf many other channels like you, too! I hear so much I would never hear, otherwise. Also, you’re right, the fees are negotiable.
Plymouth was ahead of their time with the Fury trim level structure; I, II, III or VIP they were all “Fury” at a time when Ford and Chevy were still treating each trim level as a separate “model” with its’ own nameplate. Even the other Mopar divisions weren’t there yet, Chrysler with the New Yorker and Newport, Dodge with the Polara and Monaco.
As Petula Clark might said “And the beat goes on”. 😉
Loved this!! Thanks for posting it. (My mom looked like Petula Clark back in the day… I’d post a picture, but she’d probably kill me. She does occasionally read my essays. 😉 )
It is amazing how fast and far the big Fury line fell after 1968, especially considering that Ford and Chevrolet retained their vitality in the segment.
I have always preferred the 67. I never understood the 68 grille, which was only a grille in the top half with a body-color panel in the bottom half. This owner must agree with me because his lower grille panel seems to be painted black to disguise it.
But 30 seconds behind the wheel would eliminate any complaints. Joe, if you want a big 60s sled these C bodies are maybe the best bang for the buck you can get.
“This owner must agree with me because his lower grille panel seems to be painted black to disguise it.”
Find another ’68 and unscrew the top grill and transplant it to this car. You’d have to remove the chrome surrounding piece for the lower half to make it fit. Check out my admittedly bad edit below
Or you could just swap it out for the 67 version 🙂
That would be too easy! Or not. Look at the trim chrome tiny bits on the ends of the grill in this picture of a ’67. I’m not sure it would be a quick swap.
It would be one less interesting story about the restoration.
“See this grill, I had to customize it to make it look this good. I found the bottom part on eBay and had to wait weeks to get it and I wasn’t sure if it would work.”
JP, I can’t un-see the grille thing! I probably noticed when I had originally edited these photos, but had forgotten. It makes little sense that the grille wasn’t “stacked” like on the ’66, or as in MarkKyle64’s brilliant illustration below.
Part of the problem, though, is that the line that would bisect the upper and lower grilles wouldn’t line up with the same line between the pairs of stacked headlights, which would look sloppy.
“Brilliant” ?? Aww thanks!! I don’t think Plymouth cared about the line between the headlights anyway, since the _stock_ one doesn’t coincide with the split between the stacked headlights either. “We sweat the details” wasn’t a commercial tagline yet.
Looking at the tiny trim pieces and the detailwork of the ’67 that I found on the net, it would be a labour of love by someone obsessive to switch _all_ those parts over, or even find them all unless you had a complete car right there with all pieces present and in good shape – which would imply the rest of the car is in just as good a shape and you wouldn’t use a car like that for a donor. Cars back then (and since) had an annoying tendency to lose trim, especially the same pieces over and over on different cars of the same model due to sloppy factory assembly-line workmanship or actual errors of design. How soon before ALL of the second gen Monte Carlos lost that metal chrome clipped onto the plastic rear bumper? 10 years? Finding a junkyard donor with everything you need? I dunno.
It would be easier just to find another junkyard ’68 and swap the trim over. Since no one will ever be doing a concours level restoration of these like they do Hemi Chargers and Hemi Cuda convertibles, it seems a pleasing and expedient way of making it look better to me. And much easier. I like easy!
I wondered if it could be possible then they drawed the 68 grille in the way to prepare us for the 1969 models? There was an article of Collectible Automobile published around 2001 who mentionned then Plymouth originally wanted to continue with the stacked headlights for 69 but couldn’t due to safety bumpers.
Objectivily the ’67 grill is a much better design, but I’ve always liked the ’68 and find the ’67 kind of dull. Tastes are funny I guess.
An acre of red Fury is just what’s needed to distract me from heaps of dirty gritty melting snow.
All it needs is a vintage Sun tach under the bottom edge of the dash, get rid of that modern one blocking the speedo.
The placement of the tach was baffling to me, too. Overall, though, this car was beautiful and in great shape. These pictures don’t lie.
I recall thinking that I had wished the taillights would have mimicked the style of the headlights more closely, to make a more symmetrical appearance. Overall, a very nice find. A convertible too, meaning it never did any taxi or police duty. Very nice.
You mean like a 1966 Tempest? The 1968 Coronet was the car that had the similar, flared taillights.
Chrysler did some goofy things (it wouldn’t be Chrysler if they didn’t, right?) and one of them was how they split the mid-sixties Pontiac styling between Plymouth and Dodge. Dodge was ‘supposed’ to be a competitor to Pontiac, yet it was Plymouth that got the Pontiac’s stacked headlight look.
Dodge’s full-size cars seemed to be trying to go upmarket against Oldsmobile styling in those years. Yet, it was Dodge that got the flared taillights that mimicked Pontiac.
I guess I can’t blame Lynn Townsend’s conservative “let’s just do what GM did last model cycle” approach too much. They were trying to cover all the GM bases and, frankly, didn’t do too bad of a job of it. Certainly better than AMC’s efforts, that’s for sure.
After the increasingly wacky Exner years, Townsend was determined to get Chrysler Corporation’s styling “back into the mainstream.” In the 1960s, that meant, “copy GM.”
Which is what Elwood Engel did for a few years – at least until the fuselage-styled 1969 C-bodies. Even then, I thought that the 1969 Plymouth looked like a fuselage version of the 1966 full-size Chevrolet.
I like it. I’d like it better with BF Goodrich T/A tires on it (cliche I know.)
I am trying to figure out the reasoning behind the tach though, and it seems like the location is pretty terrible.
When parked you could turn on the 4 way flashers and the left turn signal, depress the brake pedal and voila, the radio would come on!
That’s just awesome. I love that you (or somebody) had figured that out.
My Dad bought a ’68 Fury II sedan when I was 15. I read about that trick in one of the car magazines I bought back in the day.
Well, almost. The radio would only play in time with the turn signals. So, in effect, you only got to listen to 50% of the music.
You just HAD to remind us of Nehru jackets!!
My then future brother-in-law (it was 1968) had one of these in avocado green (of course) with a white top and interior. Unfortunately, he hadn’t made many payments before my sister drove it up a tree one snowy day in the Poconos. Since she wasn’t yet on his insurance, he wasn’t able to replace the car so had to drive a 57 Plymouth for a few years until that convertible was paid off.
Like others here, I never understood the front end treatment. It looked like they had a stack of random parts to fill the opening between the headlights and they settled on these unrelated pieces.
J P…I went and looked at a Miata a month ago and just barely fit in it with the top up. I keep hoping I will find a Mustang before the summer price bump up, but my insistence on a manual transmission leaves almost no options.
that’s weird, insurance covers the car in most if not every state
insurance will cover any driver, family member who lives with you, and even your dependent children away at school, so long as they have your permission to drive your vehicle.
This happened in 1968, and judging by the way the post was worded, his sister was not yet married to his brother-in-law at the time of the accident. That is most likely why her accident wasn’t covered by the insurer.
I underwrite insurance policies, including for autos, and I understand that different carriers have different policies, but my experience has been that (in current day, anyway) “permitted drivers” / permissive use are/is usually covered. The issue might have been if your sister was determined to be a regular operator of that vehicle without being rated for on that policy.
(Oh, no – my two worlds are colliding!) In any rate, I’m glad both your sister and B.I.L. were okay.
Ooh, hey, that’s a real looker. I’d sooner have a closed-top car; I quick-fry to a crackling, crunchy crisp in the sun, and had a very frightening near miss incident in a rented convertible some years back that sort of finished souring me on them. But I do like a ’68 Plymouth. The grille doesn’t perturb me. I’ll have mine with the Australian taillight configuration, please and thanks.
That Dodge version looks like it’s supposed to go the full length of the trunk lid.
Sometimes this classic Mopar-model gets a registration as a Plymouth Fury 111 here, after import and (official) inspection and approval.
That is just glorious. I can see why you tempted!
A great find! There was an all-original 1968 Fury III convertible at the 2017 Fall Carlisle show in silver-blue metallic. That car featured a black vinyl interior and the regular wheel covers. The price was actually reasonable.
I prefer the 1967 Fury – the sloped back end minimizes the “blocky” look of the entire car. The most attractive body style for both years is the four-door hardtop, followed by the station wagons, but the convertible comes off better for 1968 than either of the two-door hardtops. That squared-off back end does not mate very well with the two-door hardtop style.
Any pretense of “sportiness” was gone by 1968 with these cars. They actually come off best as junior-edition Imperials (or New Yorkers), in my opinion.
Plymouth undoubtedly used the “I, II and III” model designations to let fleet buyers know that they weren’t overpaying for a deluxe edition, while also signaling to retail buyers that they had moved up the Fury food chain. The police car and taxi cab business was important to Plymouth in the late 1960s. For quite a few years, for example, the Pennsylvania State Police drove full-size Plymouths.
Outstanding work as always Joseph. Thank you for this wonder respite from late winter. Always appreciate your thoughtful writing and professional photography. I hope you someday post a collection here of some your favourite pics you’ve uploaded to Paul’s site over the years. It would be quite a spectacle!
The speedometer face looks quite familiar. Going from my memory, it looks like the same design used on the early 70s Valiant. As I recall from the Spielberg movie ‘Duel’ with Dennis Weaver.
I prefer these over the 67s, I think the grille design is quite clever, the stylists wanted a narrow grille opening but without comprimising air flow hence the body colored perforated panel, and eliminating the divided look maximises the width of the car. (as if that was ever needed ) the effect is best seen on the white car in the ad (10th picture down)
With its 383 V8 this would be a fun car to have, maybe peak full size Plymouth.
And Magnum 500 wheels are perfect for these big square Mopars.
Remember when Chevrolet, Ford, and Plymouth were known as the ‘low priced three’?
One of the most interesting features of this Plymouth as well as other Mopars of this era were the flood lit instrument panels. The first time I saw this was in a 1967 Fury 3 my parents had as a rental car. Not everyone was in love with it but I thought it was very cool.
I first saw that on the 72 Newport owned by a friend’s dad. I had never seen anything like it. My initial reaction was that it was just cheapness but I have come to like it.
My 68 fury3.
Very nice! It looks great in red with the black top. Nice custom wheels, too. Summer will be here before we all know it. 🙂
Beautiful car ! What size rim and tire setup is that? I have a 68 fury 3 and that is the look I’m going for.